Virtual reality to be a major player at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival

The Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier program, a social and creative experimental space that showcases media installations, multimedia performances, and transmedia experiences, has attracted a slew of virtual reality experiences to the festival. In fact, of the 13 installations in the 2015 program, nine will feature virtual reality.

As the Sundance.org website states: “New Frontier champions films that expand, experiment with, and explode traditional storytelling. Recognizing the crossroads of film, art, and media technology as a hotbed for cinematic innovation, New Frontier is also a venue showcasing innovative media installations and panel discussions that explore the expansion of cinema culture in today's rapidly changing media landscape.”

Senior programmer Shari Frilot, who has curated the New Frontier program for the past nine years, said, “I've never really seen anything like this where a new technology is so muscularly poised to hit the market. This is the year that we're really going to get wired into this hardware in a major way. It really has the potential to shift the [filmmaking] terrain quite a bit in a very significant and deep way.”

The line-up at the Utah festival, which will occur Jan. 22 – Feb. 1, will include an experience that allows users to confront a kaiju attack, an Oculus Rift-enabled spin on combat training and the Birdly flight simulator, which uses sensory-motor coupling to mimic the experience of a bird in flight.

However, 2015 will not mark the first year that Oculus technology has been a part of the festival. In 2012, Palmer Luckey, the original founder of Oculus VR and inventor of the Oculus Rift, integrated virtual reality goggles into Nonny de la Peña's “immersive journalism” project Hunger in Los Angeles. Last year, attendees were able to test out Oculus Rift technology in EVE: Valkyrie, a virtual reality team-based game that pits characters from Hollywood blockbusters against each other in dogfighting battles. Since the entrance of new VR players to the scene, such as Samsung's Gear VR and Google Cardboard, Oculus has some additional competition to contend with at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.

Virtual reality has been integrated into many conferences and shows within the past several years. So, what about the fact that the technology will be appearing at a large film festival makes the story all that different? Many contend that it’s because experiencing VR at a film festival is not merely for the “cool” marketing factor. Rather, some filmmakers are adapting the technology and making it a major part of their filmmaking strategy because it provides an entirely new way to experience movies.

At the 2015 Sundance, festival-goers can expect to see – and experience – the following from the New Frontier program:
– Evolution of Verse , which uses Cardboard and is being called a CGI “journey from beginning to new beginning.”
– Project Syria , which was written and directed by Nonny de la Peña, uses virtual reality in a documentary film format, placing viewers in war-torn Syria so they can experience the impacts of war on the country’s children.
– Perspective; Chapter I: The Party is a New Frontier VR installation from Sundance veteran Rose Troche, documenting a date-rape scenario and playing it out from both sides.
– Kaiju Fury is another VR installation that puts viewers into a city as monsters are about to destroy it.

And these are just a few of the VR installations that will be present at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.

On an international stage where success has historically been determined by subject matter, acting, and image quality, it remains to be seen just how much of an impact virtual reality will have on filmmaking. But one thing is certain: With initiatives such as the Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier program, filmmakers have more tools at their disposal to give festival-goers — and eventually the general public — more of an immersive movie experience than ever before.

Via WIRED